Compute dominates; right-size, consolidate, use Spot for tolerant work, and commit for the steady base.

Typical shape of an EKS bill (illustrative)

EC2 compute

Data transfer

Load balancers

Storage

Cluster fees

1 Consolidate

Karpenter or Auto Mode remove idle and underused nodes. Often the biggest saving for spiky fleets.

2 Right-size requests

Use VPA recommendations or metrics. Over-requested Pods waste nodes.

3 Spot for tolerant work

Batch, stateless and replicated workloads on diversified Spot pools, often far cheaper than On-Demand.

4 Commit and architecture

Compute Savings Plans for the steady base (they apply across instance types and to Fargate), and Graviton (arm64) for better price-performance where images support it.

Make cost visible per team: enable split cost allocation or use OpenCost, then review it weekly, because you cannot optimise what you cannot attribute.

Where EKS money goes and the levers that matter

The shape of an EKS bill is almost always dominated by compute. The chart is illustrative and your proportions will differ, but the lesson holds: node cost, then data transfer, then load balancers, storage and the small per-cluster fee. So the biggest wins come from using fewer, better-packed nodes.

First consolidation: Karpenter or Auto Mode continually replace underused nodes with fewer or cheaper ones. Second right-sizing: Pod requests set the node count, so requests that are twice actual use double the bill. Third Spot capacity for fault-tolerant workloads, using broad instance pools and graceful termination. Fourth commitments and architecture: Compute Savings Plans discount a steady hourly spend across instance types and Fargate, and Graviton (arm64) instances often give better price-performance when your images are multi-arch.

Do not forget the hidden lines: cross-AZ data transfer, NAT gateway processing, idle load balancers and orphaned EBS volumes. The attribution problem is as important as the levers. Enable split cost allocation data for EKS or run OpenCost or Kubecost so that each team sees what its namespaces cost, and review weekly. Deck 6 covers capacity planning and cost governance in depth.

Reveal the four levers with the right arrow. Gotcha: aggressive consolidation and Spot without PDBs and graceful termination trade money for reliability; make that trade deliberately.